You know how we have these secret dreams that we'd never admit...things we wish we were, or did? There's lots of things I'd like to be in my heart of hearts....a writer, a speaker...I'd love to be up on the stage like Twila Paris, singing my heart out. Oh yeah. Those are things I want to be. But secretly more than all of those I want to be......
Funny.
Nothing pumps me up more than thinking I made someone laugh. To that end I frequently find myself sending a friend an email in the middle of the day...something to break up the boredom of the day...something to make me forget for just a few minutes the pile of work on my desk. Yesterday was just such a time. A friend across the hall had shared about going to the dentist at lunch and seeing a woman out walking her dog in the middle of the day. We both agreed that we really needed to be independently wealthy so we didn't have to work. My friend has never had the luxury of staying home. I have --- my kids were 20, 14 & 12 before I worked outside of the home. So I don't have any pie-in-the-sky illusions about staying home. I know well those days can be just as hard as working outside the home and being home doesn't necessarily mean everything is always clean and organized and homemade. But yesterday the email went like this:
Can you imagine? Wake up in the morning, make a lovely breakfast for the kids and then get them all off to school. Come home, sit down with your coffee and read the whole newspaper. Clean the house. Take a shower. Call a friend to 'do lunch'. Run by the mall and see what new stuff is out. Go home and start dinner, the kids come home and you are all relaxed, dinner is already cooking.
And then you go to bed to do it all over again the next day.
OR.....
Wake up in the morning and realize you've overslept. Scream like a witch at everyone to GET THE HECK UP! Stand in your closet and realize you have nothing to wear because you forgot the cleaning AGAIN.....or you stand in your closet and think "how many pairs of black pants does one person need and I am sick to death of black pants"....then put on the black pants and scream at the kids again to get in the car....toss them all a lovely nutritious pop tart and a juice box. Drive like a bat out of hell to get the kids to school on time, go to day care and drop the baby off only to realize you were supposed to bring snacks today. Screech out of the parking lot, scaring half the people there, run to the grocery store and buy some lovely, healthy prepackaged, artificially flavored, preservative laden block of sugar....drive back to daycare and fling it out the window as you slow down and then get here to work. To hear "um, are you busy? I can't figure out how to make my icons bigger on my desktop and by the way would you mind terribly running downstairs and getting me something to eat?"
That was my email to my friend. Her reply to me?????
OMG, I'm rolling over here. Guess what {child's name} had for breakfast this morning????? A Strawberry Pop Tart and a Big Bird juice box.
She did say she was laughing though.
